The present invention relates to optical scanning and optical character recognition systems, and more particularly, to means for converting documents into electronic data which can be extracted and manipulated.
Paper-intensive businesses and governmental agencies, e.g., insurance claim processing companies, credit card companies and taxing authorities, require large staffs and a great amount of physical plant. Also, they tend to operate inefficiently and are prone to make numerous errors. This leads to large operating expenses and customer dissatisfaction.
A paper-intensive company may receive tens of thousands of documents a day. This type of company can be of two general types, i.e. a transaction company or an archive company, and how a company handles the paper it receives will depend on the type of company it is. A transaction company must obtain data from the documents immediately. Then the data is transferred to a series of people who must act on it. The sequence of those transactions is usually well known. Once the transactions are complete, the data may be stored. While it must be possible to recover the stored data, only a small portion of it is ever likely to be retrieved. Also, the reasons for retrieval are random. A medical claims processing company is an example of a transaction company.
An archive company stores the information as soon as it is received and without processing. It may, for example, microfilm the received documents as a form of storage. A large percentage of the information stored by the archive type company will be retrieved, but the reasons for the requests for information will be well-known. A government agency that keeps birth certificates is an example of an archive company.
Archive companies can store data slowly without incurring much customer dissatisfaction, but transaction companies must complete their transactions quickly. Archive companies must be able to quickly retrieve all of their records, but transaction companies only need quick access to a small proportion of their records. For example, people expect to be able to get a copy of a birth certificate decades old in a few minutes, but would not expect a company to have fast access to a 1 year old medical claim. There will not be many requests for information on medical claims that have already been processed, but there are continuing requests for birth records.
The tens of thousands of documents received by a transaction type company may be of various types. These must be sorted and routed to the proper person for action. Thus, in a typical mailroom, there must be a large number of people who are trained to recognize the type of document received and to direct the document to the correct location. Also, the shear volume of paper makes it necessary to have a very large mailroom. This mailroom is usually an unattractive place for workers, being filled with seemingly endless stacks of papers. This leads to lowered moral and numerous errors. Such a physical plant is also costly.
Some of the problems of sorting incoming documents can be reduced by insisting on the use of standardized forms, especially those that are color-coded. However, if the customer mistakenly uses the wrong form, it can be directed to the wrong location and can be lost in the system for days or weeks among millions of other documents.
Once a document is sorted, it is then necessary to physically move it from one location to another for processing. This again requires numerous personnel and some amount of space. Also, the deliveries are slow, subject to error and unsightly. In addition, this may be a very inefficient step. There may be people in one location capable of processing the document who are not busy, but that location may be so remote from the sorted documents, e.g., in another town, that it is impractical to transmit the physical documents to that location. The people at the location where the document is located may be so busy that they cannot process it for days. To combat this it is often necessary to have excess staff at all locations, which is costly.
After a document reaches a person who must act on it substantively, the problems are not over. Critical information must be accurately retrieved from the document and evaluated. Typically, the information is loaded into a large computer which keeps track of the information and any action taken in response to it. There is considerable chance for error during the information retrieval and computer storage step, especially if the document is filled out by hand and the person processing the document is fatigued by the large volume. Further, in a health insurance or credit card business or in a taxing authority, there are usually complex rules on how to respond to or treat the information in a file. In some cases these rules must be looked up manually, a further source of error and delay. Even when the rules are stored on computer, it is necessary for the operator to properly code the information so that the computer applies the proper rules. For example, the rate of insurance reimbursement may vary for the same medical treatment, depending on the subscriber,s health insurance plan. Here the chance for error also exists.
Assuming that a document is properly acted upon and the correct information is delivered to the customer, e.g., a tax payer, that person may have questions. Thus, customer service representatives will at least need access to the computerstored information on the original document in order to respond to the questions. However, it is not unusual for the customer service representatives to need to see a copy of the original document and any correspondence with the client, not just the computer data. This means that someone will have to locate the physical file created in response to the original document.
When large numbers of documents are processed, it is impossible to keep many of the files convenient to a service representative. Thus, the files are usually stored off-site, e.g., on microfilm, and it may take days or weeks to retrieve the file and respond to customer inquiries.
As indicated, at various stages of the document handling process described, computers can help to reduce the errors. For example, it is known that typed and computerprinted documents can be optically scanned to recover an image of the document for storage in digital form or otherwise. Such storage can be on tape or optical disk. Also, optical character recognition units can extract data electronically from an image of a typed or computer printed document.
Electronic representations of data and documents can be transmitted from one location to another for subsequent processing. However, these devices are used only after a good deal of time has been spent manually processing the documents so that they are acceptable for handling by electronic equipment. In addition, an image of a single document can require up to 50,000 bytes of information. Thus, with a 2400 baud modem, it would take at least 20 seconds to transmit the image. If 100,000 documents are received in a day, it would take 2 million seconds to transmit them, but there are only 86,400 seconds in a day.
While various electronic components are available for easing the workload in paper-intensive businesses, there is presently no system known to the applicant which handles a high volume of documents, essentially eliminates the need for the physical document soon after it is received, reduces errors, reduces fatiguing labor, and allows transactions to be carried out at remote locations so the work load can be efficiently distributed.